


I've Lived Since Then

by scioscribe



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Bittersweet, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 10:02:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11228679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: A tense anticlimax full of poorly-executed good intentions, punctuated by threats, with a questionable and ambiguous achievement: so the wedding had turned out to be like all the other work he had done for the Rebellion after all.





	I've Lived Since Then

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to the people who read a couple snippets of this and offered encouragement.

“If this is what we fight for,” K-2 said mournfully, “we fight for the triumph of madness.”

Cassian adjusted his jacket, which had been tailored for another man. The Alliance’s funding ran to fighters, bribes, and base installations, not to salaries, and so when someone fell, their possessions went into an informal commissary, to be bought, begged, bartered for, or stolen at will or convenience. Never entirely without sentiment, though. They all had sewing skills rudimentary enough at least to stitch the necessary black X, the acknowledgement of whoever had come before them. Maybe it was bad luck, getting married in a dead man’s clothes.

“It’s supposed to be about peace,” he said.

“Madness,” K-2 repeated. “You’ve never even met this woman. And with her background, she could be anyone, capable of anything. She could kill you in your sleep.”

“I’m a light sleeper.”

“You won’t be when you’re dead. You should never have agreed.”

“What I should never have done is asked you to stand by me while I did it.”

“So you admit that your thinking lately has been confused,” K-2 said.

“K. The Republic was built on exchange, mutual responsibility, political choices. This is what civilization looks like when it’s not the Empire.”

“To me it all seems like forcing people to do what they don’t want to do.”

But no one was making him do this, or if they were, what did it matter? He had been ordered to do worse things. He had broken the back of a woman, an Imperial guard, and dropped her body face-down in a mud puddle with no time even to roll her over before he had to run again. This task was different only in that it was cleaner. More complicated, but cleaner.

The Alliance had reached an impasse with Saw Gerrera. His extremism had been useful to them for a time—for one person, he cast an enormous shadow, painted a kind of fleeting monster on the bedroom walls of all the good servants of the Empire as they lay in the dark. It was good to know their enemies were afraid. But he had become too unpredictable. It was either kill him or somehow bring him back into the fold. Provide an incentive for him to value the stability of the Rebel Alliance.

So Captain Cassian Andor would marry Saw’s adopted daughter, Jyn Erso, the child of an Imperial collaborator.

He had declined K’s offer to tell him the probability of all this going wrong.

 

* * *

“Listen to me,” Saw said. “This is all the safety I can buy you. And I’m paying dearly for it.”

“ _You’re_ paying?” Jyn kept her voice low. “You can say that?”

He looked as if she’d struck him. “Can you doubt it, Jyn?” He took her hands in his. All the time now, his skin was feverishly hot. He’d never recovered from his last injury, not truly, he’d only added more plating, his whole left shoulder now as smooth and stiff as chitin. “For you, and only for you, would I ever sacrifice my principles. Would I ever compromise. You know what I think of the Alliance! Milk-blooded fools. But for _you_ —I say, I will keep her safe from the people here who do not understand. No more running for you. They will protect you—how can they not? They take no risks, they dream so small. You will have a life, have whatever your share of the fight may be. And in return, I let them teach me _morality_.”

“I didn’t ask you for any of this.”

“You asked me,” Saw said. He sounded so old. “You asked me by becoming my own daughter. And this is all I can do for you—what your father and mother tried to do.”

“To abandon me,” she said, lifting her chin.

“To go on alone to a place where you would have no joy in following.” He let her go. “But I have no wish to compel you. Nor, if the training I’ve given you is of any use, any power to. But this is the point we’ve come to, where you must decide.”

It meant nothing to him, she knew, that Cassian Andor had already arrived. If she told Saw no, that would be the end of all this, forever. But she also knew he would leave—he had left her once, when she was sixteen, abandoned her like an unwanted animal. Then, he had come back. But she’d been a child back then and was one no longer and this time he would not turn around for her. She was so accustomed to seeing the backs of people leaving her, as if she’d never seen anyone face-to-face at all.

It would be some prize, at least, to be the one to walk away. And if it meant walking to a stranger, what difference did that make? She barely remembered what it was like to live among friends.

“I’ll go. I’ll marry him.”

Saw ran his thumb beneath her eyes, one after the other. “My beloved girl. Don’t cry. You will always be,” he touched his chest, the part over his heart that was still flesh-and-blood, “right here. With me.”

 

* * *

 

Cassian had once had a hologram of his parents’ wedding. For years, he had carried it from berth to berth, sometimes so exhausted when he was finally able to trust his surroundings enough to close his eyes that he didn’t watch it for comfort but only took it out and held it, let the slightly sharp edges dig into the palm of his hand. Eventually—in a valley so dense with mist that he had felt it moving over his skin like silk—he had lost it. He didn’t know how.

But he had watched it so often that every flicker of it was ingrained in his memory. It was all he knew of weddings, really, because arrangements in the Alliance were rarely permanent and almost never formal.

Now, cynically, he wondered if maybe they encouraged all that—the fumbling encounters in the dark, the port-of-call friendships where no names were ever even exchanged. Why not? It kept them free to do what they were doing now with him.

So he had said, if it was all right, he would like it to look like his parents’ wedding. Their customs.

If Jyn Erso had any objections to that, she never spoke them. When he finally met her, her face was so still and so lifeless, she looked like a woman in stasis, held behind a pane of glass. But she held up her hands when the time came for him to paint her knuckles with cobalt, and she did the same to him. They held their hands out, palms up, over the dish of metallic dust and watched as the cobalt’s magnetism drew it up in a glittering veil. It was supposed to symbolize something, but Cassian didn’t know what—there’d been no sound on the hologram—and their officiant didn’t know either. So Cassian just looked at it all—his hands, her hands, and the dense mist of sharpness as bright as stars, like some trapped bit of space.

They needed to pledge themselves to each other, and of course he had no script for that either. Maybe he’d been of limited use in this planning, what there was of it, but it had let him reach back, at least briefly, and feel something of what he’d left behind.

“Jyn,” he said. “This is strange to me. Not something I ever thought I’d be doing. But I take the promises I make seriously, and for as long as you care to, I’ll—hold true to you. Be a partner.” That seemed like all he could offer honestly.

He’d expected her to need to be nudged to speak next—she seemed so closed into her own mind—but she made her vows at once, and in a clear voice as polished as silver.

“Cassian. I don’t know you. And I don’t know your ideology, or if I even have any use for it. I don’t think about politics, I’ve always just done what needed to be done just to get from one day to the next. But I’ll be at your back if you need me there, and I’ll do what I can for you.”

“That’s touching,” K-2 said, his voice so dry it might have been toasted. “What self-sacrifice. What nobility. We could all learn from her example.”

That got a reaction out of her, at least: she looked at him over Cassian’s shoulder and said, sharply, “I could take you apart, you know.”

“Your body is far more vulnerable than mine,” K said.

A tense anticlimax full of poorly-executed good intentions, punctuated by threats, with a questionable and ambiguous achievement: so the wedding had turned out to be like all the other work he had done for the Rebellion after all. There was no redemption here. Just someone he didn’t know, pale-faced and hair-triggered.

 

* * *

“Not much of a honeymoon,” Jyn said. “Two nights in a converted escape pod.” If she balanced each word on the razor’s edge of the sardonic, even she wouldn’t know what she really felt. Why not? She had years of proof that it was an effective strategy. She took her hair down one pin at a time and felt some relief as it fell down to cover her neck, as if she were fastening a plate of body armor. “They’ll want us to consummate.”

Cassian—her husband—inclined his head a little. He was taking off his jacket and folding it neatly, his every movement precise and controlled. “Yes. Especially since there’s no formal contract.”

He was so fine-boned, she thought, and between the careful attention he gave to each bit of clothing he was discarding and to and how clean-shaven he was, he seemed the more civilized of the two of them. Jyn had gone to bed with clotted blood in her hair; had, in the absence of a blaster, beaten a man to death until the pulp of his brain matter wetted her boots. She was Saw Gerrera’s most adept soldier, or so he’d always said, and though he loved her—she knew that—he didn’t have it in him to lie about the war. She was his best fighter. And he had always said the Alliance was delicate. Flower petal boys and girls who would bruise easily and wilt quickly.

Not that, delicate or no, Cassian Andor seemed likely to wilt quickly. She’d give him that.

“All we’d have to do is say it happened,” Jyn said.

Cassian held still. He wasn’t shocked—she recognized that pose. He was holding himself in reserve, deciding upon a reaction.

“If you want,” she said. “Saw always said Alliance sensibilities were different.”

A smile flitted across his face, briefer than the beat of a bird’s wings. “And what are yours?”

She shrugged. “None of that means anything to me except a warm bed at night. At least for an hour or so. But I don’t know about you.”

“I can convince you of my sensibilities,” Cassian said. “They don’t preclude fucking.”

“All right.”

She moved closer to him. They were both still clothed, only their jackets shed, but when she put her hand on his arm, she could feel the warmth of him through his thin shirt: a white so translucent she could almost see his skin. She had fucked before in circumstances less congenial than this—what was a marriage compared to an Imperial outpost full of dead stormtroopers? And that hadn’t stopped her: she’d had her bare ass up on a console, her legs spread with her tattered stolen flight suit down around her ankles, some Twi’lek girl she barely knew between them with her mouth on Jyn’s clit. A highlight, really. At least here there was a bed and privacy. And not the dirt and sweat of the fight, the sour and punky stink of bodies that had slept in X-wings and storage closets and gone days without showering.

That was as close to feeling as she thought she could come: gratitude that they were both clean and that they could do this in comfort.

But she did want him. She knew that. She didn’t see why she was supposed to build a life on it—why she was alone now, except for him—but she did know it.

He put his hand on her cheek and then pushed his fingers back into her hair. She didn’t know which of them leaned forward first, only that she could feel his grip tightening in her hair, sending a low, electric thrum through her body. She opened her mouth and he opened his. She went onto her toes and held onto his shoulders, feeling precarious that way, even with his other hand now against her back, but she wanted the angle it gave her, that straight-on collision between them.

He tasted like moonshine, something so raw it should be bringing tears to her eyes, but instead, she wanted to get drunk off it. It promised she could forget everything.

And he was warm.

“You’re too tall,” she said, no longer able to hold herself up even with her hands around his neck, having to settle for the different feeling of the kiss with him bending down for her, her mouth upturned. She was so hungry for him, it was like she should warn him of it.

She expected him to say that she was too short, but instead he moved away just enough to kiss her forehead near her hairline and then undo the snap of her shirt at the nape of her neck. “I was going to be taller.”

“What happened?”

“I was indecisive. Tall and short both seemed to have their advantages.”

She let her shirt fall forward and then she was bare to him from the waist up. It was absurd to feel self-conscious.

“Like I said.” She kept her voice light. “The Alliance is too refined, too prone to compromise. If you had the backbone to make a decision, maybe I’d have a shorter husband with his mouth more within reach.”

_Husband. Don’t think about the word_.

“I need you more naked than this,” she said, and then watched as he pulled his shirt off over his head, exposing lean muscles, strong arms, a faint dusting of hair going down towards his navel and then disappearing into his trousers. She followed it down with her lips after flicking her tongue across his nipples—he grabbed at her hair again and that little spark moved through her—and then she unbuttoned him and slid down his briefs. She looked up at him looking down at her. “If I put my mouth on your cock, will you say you need me more naked than this?”

“If you do that, Jyn, I won’t be any more coherent than you’ll be.”

She felt a smile twitch her lips. “That sounds fine.”

His skin was so soft and he tasted so good—this at least, she thought clinically, was an activity greatly improved by a recent shower—even as he tasted like nothing but a kind of clean heat and then, increasingly, a slight bittersweet saltiness. She wanted more of him, couldn’t stand the unrelieved pressure between her legs. She wanted him to erase her—wanted him in her mouth and her cunt and her ass, wanted her lips and thighs both tight around him.

Even without the adrenaline of the battle. Well, she carried the battle with her everywhere, didn’t she? Even into bed.

She fumbled her own buttons open one-handed as she worked him up above her mouth, but she was no good at touching herself with her left hand: her fingers were clumsy. He pulled her up, her mouth suddenly empty, and turned her around, let her fall back against the bed as he tugged her pants down and off and then pressed his mouth where she’d had her fingers. No clumsiness there. He licked around her entrance and then to each side of her clit, a fucking tease, and only then did he pass his tongue over here there, where she most wanted to be touched. She pulled her own hair then, just to get the feeling back, that feeling of him being everywhere. He put two fingers inside her and she appreciated with a kind of harsh joy that was almost like a climax in and of itself that he didn’t start with one, didn’t ease her into anything. They did have compatible sensibilities.

She came like that—the intensity of it almost unwelcome, as fierce as a stomach cramp—and then she pulled him up and slid her legs further apart. He nodded once, twice, and then rolled off the bed and went into his pockets and came up with two anti-transmission, anti-conception strips and pressed one against her wrist and one against his.

They always made her skin pinch tight right at that spot, always made an acidic taste kick into her mouth. It wiped him off her tongue.

Jyn wanted him back but he must have wanted her back too, because as he kissed her as he thrust inside her, returned that flash of white lightning.

“Whoever made that rotgut you were drinking should’ve been shot.”

He laughed, his hair falling down against his forehead, damp with sweat. “I made it myself.”

“May the Force help you.”

She dug her fingers into his back and he leaned forward and braced himself with his elbow; rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

“Harder,” Jyn said.

She looked at him above her—the silkiness of his hair, the lines at the corners of his eyes from a life of watchfulness, the perfect angle of his jaw. He had beautiful eyes, and it had been a long time since she’d last thought anything beautiful. Anyone, she supposed, because he wasn’t just a broken collection of features, scrambled surveillance data delivered in pieces. Whatever he was, whoever he was, he wasn’t that.

 

* * *

 

He would climb the walls, locked up two days in such a small space. The next morning, he said as much to Jyn, who was eating cold tinned food with her fingers without much expression on her face.

“You must have been in tighter spots for more hours than this.”

“You say ‘must have been’ because I had to be. But that’s not true here. Room to move is like fresh air or clean water, you shouldn’t turn it down if you have the chance to seize it.”

“Thanks but no thanks.”

“I didn’t invite you,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “Specifically. It was just a recommendation.”

She shrugged. It seemed impossible that not two hours ago, she’d been pressed up against the wall of the little steam shower, forehead on forearm, her teeth gritted, tightening her ass around his cock. Now she gave him nothing. He couldn’t have said what he wanted, so silence was as good as anything else. He left her like that, with clammy gravy on her hands and a kind of blankness in her gaze.

The privacy of the converted pod was a joke, and, as far as jokes went, not a good one. Cassian had been able to hear the hubbub of the Rebel camp even as he’d lain awake in bed; had been able to see footsteps breaking the bar of light at the bottom of his door. Their door. Still, he had been in a bubble, and stepping out broke it, plunged him back into the color and noise that was his home no matter what planet it was on.

Someone had ignored all the patched-together fire and explosive regulations to start a fire that burned a kind of violet-green—they must have been using Ecadi sand, the Alliance always had some of that on hand for emergency explosives—and people were toasting bread over it. A Bith woman in theater makeup was singing, a man sitting at her feet. The princess was throwing knives at a target, her aim precise, the cowl of her robe down around her shoulders. A circle of Phindians were having a very intense, involved discussion about—Cassian could tell as he came closer—whether or not to stop the planning session they were having to serve tea. Everywhere, people had tracked mud. And a wide dark blue bloodstain was on the far wall, its shape and color dimmed but not eradicated by repeated scrubbings. Cassian himself had put his back into that particular cause not long ago and worked until his hands were raw from solvents. It was a good a thing as any to do, when one couldn’t sleep.

K-2 had been lightly powered down but as Cassian walked by, his sensors ticked and he came up to his full height. “So you’re still alive.”

“Does that change your probability calculations any?”

“There’s still time.”

“An optimist.” Cassian detoured by the open food stand and took a piece of fruit and then, after a moment’s consideration, a second piece for Jyn. “She’s what you might expect from Saw Gerrera’s daughter.”

“She isn’t only Saw Gerrera’s daughter,” K said. “She’s also the daughter of a known Imperial collaborator and a woman about whom I’ve been able to find very little information. A triad arrangement with Gerrera, possibly, though I’d say it’s a strange variety of extremist who falls into marriage with tools of the enemy. Biological lifeforms are unreasonable. My point is, both her genealogy and psychology are considerably volatile mixtures of treason and rash violence.”

“If she stayed with Saw, she’s not loyal to her parents.” And if the Alliance had pushed him into bed with a potential Imperial spy, he would find a way of addressing that himself. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

K laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not what you think it is, Cassian.”

“What isn’t?” He let the weight stay there. It was comforting somehow, and comfort, like fresh air and room to move, wasn’t something Cassian discarded during the rare moments he had it.

“What you’ve done for the Rebellion.”

“I think it’s necessary,” Cassian said, and then he did move away from K’s hand. “And I don’t think about it more than that.”

“I suppose,” K said, “this is something you could discuss with your wife. Who will have all kinds of ideas and interpretations. From her unique background.”

“Reprogramming was never supposed to make you so caustic.”

“A happy accident.”

Cassian started peeling the fruit, which was segmented and full of small, sharp seeds that pricked his fingers. He could put himself on standby as effectively as K could. So much of his work was about waiting: pressed into some alcove in a rain-soaked district with nothing but a headache and a blaster to keep him company. He’d learned a long time ago to focus on sensations. The slight slipperiness of the seeds, the sour burst of the juice against his tongue. If he concentrated, the faint hum of K’s background processing.

Notice enough details and you could keep yourself from seeing the big picture.

“You know I’m careful,” he said, in answer to a question K-2 hadn’t asked.

K inclined his head. “I know you always intend to be.”

When he went back to the pod to bring Jyn the fruit, he found her sitting outside, down in the dirt in her scuffed repurposed flight-suit pants. There were slight tear-tracks on her face. He’d be surprised if she knew it.

He sat down beside her, leaned back against their door. He offered her the fruit and she took it.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, looking at the way she punched her fingernail through the rind to peel it. Her hands were soldier’s hands—callused and spackled with scars. Her knuckles were still faintly blue from the cobalt. “But it tastes good.”

She took a bite. She said, “The air out here is nice,” with the carefulness of someone finding a phrase in a tourist lexicon.

“I like it when we can be here. There’s not a lot of constancy, but the Alliance hates to abandon decent infrastructure, and this base has been here a while. It used to be an open-air market, I think.”

Jyn nodded. “From a distance, it would look like just another village.”

“Not that ordinary villages have always been safe from Imperial attention.”

She looked at him, a bit of peel resting on the back of her hand like a petal. “Your family?”

He’d thought her expressionless before, but really, her face was like glass: seeming stillness, seeming brittleness, but completely clear about what was beneath it. She’d turned away as soon as she’d asked the question, but a little flush of embarrassment had risen in her face, as tender as a bruise. One fighter to another. She didn’t like having asked, but she had still done it.

If she was a spy, she was either a very good one or a very bad one.

“My family,” he agreed.

She ducked her head and then raised it, pushing her hair out of her face, turning to meet his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Your parents—”

“They’re dead,” Jyn said. “They’re both dead.”

That wasn’t what Cassian had heard, but he didn’t press her; he only nodded. “There’s no place in the Empire that hasn’t seen suffering.”

She sighed, with a kind of bitterness, like she’d expected this. “The Empire. Everything comes back to the damn Empire.”

He remembered now that even in her pledge to him, she’d said she had no use for ideology. At the time, he’d taken it for Saw Gerrera-like efficiency, ruthlessness elevated over principle, but how he wondered. Wondered, but didn’t ask, because the idea of an interrogation—much less a veiled one where he feigned innocence he hadn’t had in years—made him feel exhausted.

As a substitute, he took her to bed; fingered her through two climaxes before he let himself give up that disconnected attention to sensation—the smell of her arousal in the close little room, the slipperiness and heat against his hand, the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the way the muscles in her thighs jumped and twitched as she neared the edge—and be selfish. And she liked him selfish: took him in and tightened herself around him and rode him hard.

“Don’t wait,” she said breathlessly. “Don’t wait so damn long, you don’t have to.”

But he wanted to savor it, wanted to savor _her_. He hardly ever had this kind of time to commit to one lover, to one encounter. He grabbed onto her hips, digging his fingers in hard. “Tell me how to fuck you if it’s how you want to be fucked, but not how to get myself off.”

She actually grinned and he felt his own mouth curve in answer. “Fair point.”

He rose up until he was sitting with her straddling his lap and then he moved just a little, barely rocking. She closed her eyes. She was close enough to kiss, so he kissed her. Today, they both tasted the same, sour as the fruit. He put his hand between them and worked it against her clit until she shivered and came again and then he did, too. Something about the moment made him want to linger in it even after it was over, and to his surprise, Jyn stayed in place: leaned forward and pressed her lips against his forehead. She looked uncertain.

Cassian settled his hands against the small of her back and laced his fingers together. He didn’t know that he was any surer than she was. He said, “Happy one day anniversary.”

* * *

No reason for them to live together after that farce of a honeymoon, really. As the wife of Captain Cassian Andor, Jyn would automatically have a place in the honeycomb of the Alliance’s shelter cities, which was all Saw had wanted for her.

She hadn’t gotten around to thinking about what she wanted for herself. Let alone what, if anything, Cassian might want from her.

Saw would have told her not to worry about it, no matter what she’d promised. “Be selective where you put your honor, Jyn,” he’d said to her. “And even then, never be afraid to betray it if it’s necessary. The Republic cared for trust and honor, see what became of that. Be ruthless. We can redraw the line between right and wrong after the Empire has fallen, and until then, all that matters is the line between you and them. Live to make their soldiers die for your victory. And say goodbye only when you have to.”

Nearly all Saw’s lessons had been on dying, one way or another. Jyn couldn’t diagram a sentence or explain the history of the Jedi Order; the only chemical formulae she knew were the ones to build bombs or make poison gases. She knew basic medicine, several languages, code-breaking, theft, torture, deception. Knew blasters, batons, staffs, knives, hand-to-hand. But all her nursery rhymes were from her parents and the only novels she’d read had been those she’d downloaded in hasty data plug-ins, mostly fragments of serials that had been running for years. She was always coming into the middle of things.

It seemed she hadn’t lost the habit of that yet.

But it was Cassian’s home, such as it was, that she moved into, after the limbo of the escape pod. His berth was a cramped little space, like a hundred others Jyn had had over the years, though this was the first she’d shared for longer than a night. It had grease stains on the floor and the door malfunctioned, sometimes wheezing open in the middle of the night and letting in the noise of the hub. So far, so standard.

But he had _decorated_ it, and that was something she’d never thought of doing. He must have only had scraps to work with—a tattered indigo rug, a finely-knit white blanket with a hole in it that had been very carefully patched with a scrap of buff leather, an Imperial Standard calendar set into the wall in blinking violet lights.

He saw her looking. “What?”

“It’s pretty,” she said, and she hated how she sounded. That stupid raw ache in her voice, like she was a child. She used to have violet curtains in her bedroom—she hadn’t thought of that in years. “I don’t know. It’s nice.”

Cassian smiled at her, just a little. “Can you paint? Pictures, I mean.”

“I’d be surprised. I can draw diagrams—building layouts, terrain maps. I’ve never drawn a flower or a bowl of fruit, if that’s the kind of thing you mean.”

“I’ve been meaning to put something here.” He touched the wall. “A view.”

“You’d spend time on that knowing you could have to abandon this place tomorrow? When you know you could never see it again?”

“If it were a real view, I’d never see it again either,” Cassian said reasonably enough. He kept his hand against the wall. Jyn looked at the little triangles of chalky clay between his spread fingers, which felt less intimate than looking at him directly, at the fine hair on the back of his hand, the little scar that skimmed along just under his knuckles. “I don’t mind the work.”

Jyn tried to think of landscapes, but it wasn’t her wall to mar, whatever awkward slashes of color she thought might approximate Jedha or even the way the sun had looked coming up behind the crop field at the house on Lah’mu. That was fine. It would be better to see Cassian’s memory of a good sky: she knew so little about him.

“What would you paint?”

He took a step back and framed a rectangle with his fingers and thumbs, like he really was measuring for a painting. When he answered her, his voice was decisive. “A forest.”

“Did you grow up near one?”

“Nowhere so quiet.” Her own memories held enough bruises that she’d been wary of asking, but Cassian didn’t seem to mind answering. “I was born in a guest spot, if you know those. A village that makes an economy out of quaintness, builds hotels to bring in families who will like how all the homes look like they were built a century ago, how they can buy their children sweets cooked in a clay oven, send their families novelty two-dimensional holograms. My parents owned a shop that sold spiritual relics. Fragments of kyber and the teeth of dead goddesses, all with little data chips that explained the provenance and the history.”

“Was it nice?”

“I wasn’t there long enough to say for sure. My family used to say it was an expensive place to live.” He shrugged. “And then I lived many, many other places, for a very long time. Sometimes I forget if there were two moons there or only one, and I don’t check, because I want to remember. If it ever comes back to me.”

“I know what you mean.” She was surprised by the steadiness of her voice.

“Most people here do.”

That might have been true in the Partisans, too, but no one had ever talked about it, or at least they hadn’t talked about it with the daughter of Galen Erso, the fucking traitor-collaborator off somewhere getting rich off blood and broken bodies. They blamed her for their losses, why would they go to her for consolation on them? There was no reason for people here to be any different, but—Cassian was. Or seemed to be. She couldn’t claim to really know him yet.

Jyn cleared her throat. “So why a forest?”

“Trees so thick no one’s ever built between them,” Cassian said, “or even cut them down. Somewhere unspoiled. I’ve never been to a place like that.”

His voice was wistful. She wanted to tell herself that he was naïve to put faith in the idea that things would be better, or even more innocent, anywhere else in the galaxy, but he made her feel young for thinking that, like his hope was harder-earned than her cynicism. She was the one thinking that all she had known was all there was. Somewhere, once, there’d been a little village with a shop full of reliquaries and old-fashioned candy, and it had lived before it had died. Who was she to tell him which part of that should matter?

She said, “I’ve never seen a place like that either.”

 

* * *

 

Cassian’s orders came down.

“Pure surveillance,” Mon Mothma said, “unless you see a chance to infiltrate without any risk, and you won’t. The natural gases the Empire draws from this planet power half its starships, and they know the value of that. Our source claims that three months ago, a miner tried to smuggle out a container tube of gas. She was caught and executed, though not summarily. The process was… quite prolonged.”

“Then I’ll be sure not to steal anything,” Cassian said.

She smiled just slightly, which was the most she ever gave anyone. Cassian knew there were those who minded Mon Mothma’s sense of remove, her glacial coolness, but he had never been one of them. He wished he could borrow it, that was all. Whenever he felt nothing, it was from numbness—dead nerve endings, paralysis—and not from any sense of serenity.

“No longer than ten days, Captain. Consider the deadline firm.”

“Should I try to locate our contact?”

“I doubt you could, through pure surveillance. They won’t be wearing a sign around their neck. It isn’t a priority, in any case. A pilot will take you out in the morning and drop you within half a day’s walk of the camp.”

In his experience, Rebel Command made optimistic assessments of how much distance constituted a day’s walk, but that wasn’t why he lingered, even after she turned back to the holo-map, the look on her face saying that in her head he was already gone.

“I’d like to bring Jyn.”

She straightened up. “Erso?”

He nodded.

Mon Mothma tilted her head. “You’re finding her trustworthy, then?”

He thought of K and grinned. “I find she hasn’t killed me in my sleep. It would take seeing her in action to know anything more than that.”

“I’d trust your estimation, in lieu of better evidence.”

But he found her hard to distill into a single assessment. She was a good shot and even better in hand-to-hand and staff-work, her reflexes as quick as the flashes of minnows in a pond; she was a bad liar capable of convincing only herself; she was starved for home. She had no love for the Empire, but she had none for the Rebellion, either, not even as a concept. She had just lived a life in places and among people where the fight was the only thing there was to do, the only thing there was to be good at. And she had a laugh that always sounded a little like a gasp, like whatever had delighted her, however briefly, had hit her like a punch.   None of that was an answer.

“She’s convinced she’s a pragmatist,” he said.

An elegant eyebrow arch. “And you believe she’s an idealist?”

“Not really. She has virtues more than principles. But her virtues are enough.”

“In that case, yes, take her, if she wants to go. Just make sure she doesn’t follow in her father’s footsteps—either father’s.” She brought two lines on the board into intersection and frowned at them. “Gerrera’s calm restraint doesn’t seem, so far, to differ much from his fanaticism. It’s one thing to make a bad bargain, but if she proves untrustworthy, General Draven wouldn’t blink twice at making Saw pay for reneging on the terms of his agreement by abandoning his daughter on the nearest planet.”

“Then we’d have outright war with our own people.”

“His partisans are not our people, Captain. That’s the source of disagreement to begin with.”

He held his ground. “Jyn is with us.”

Mon Mothma smiled an unrevealing smile—all he could get from it was a trace of pity. “Or at any rate, convinced of her pragmatism, she isn’t with him?”

“We’ve made do with less before.”

“That’s true enough.” She turned back to her board, her hand hovering over the acute angle she’d created. “Unless there’s anything else, Captain Andor, you and your marital complications are dismissed.”

He found Jyn looking over one of the sabacc tables. She’d been venturing further and further afield, making acquaintances if not friends, and he was amused to see that she’d convinced someone to give her a cheroot: she was smoking it in quick little puffs as she watched the blue player overrun the yellow. He went up by her side.

“Do you have any money on it?”

“No, thankfully. Because I’d thought to wager on yellow, and only got here too late for it.” She offered him a drag.

“Not my poison.”

“You save all your vices for homemade liquor?”

“And a few for you.”

“That’s antiquated,” Jyn said, but she was smiling. “Alliance Jedi-reverence. A lack of celibacy hardly—”

“I need to talk you.”

The smile faded. “All right.”

He found an isolated stretch of alley for them. He didn’t know why he thought it needed privacy—anything short of the details was no secret, not on their own turf. But he didn’t want the pressure of a crowd to weigh into her decision about whether or not to come.

If she said no, maybe it would be best to tell her that Draven might waffle on keeping her around if she weren’t useful. Untrustworthy was different from unhelpful, but he had no wish to depend on an irate council being able to make that distinction.

“I’m being sent to Wobani, to watch the labor camp mines, to see where they might be sabotaged—it’s a considerable Imperial resource, taking it out of the equation would be—” He didn’t have a word for it. He’d given up saying any of the most useful ones, given up _pivotal_ and _a way to win the war_ ; hope was a resource like everything else, and he had to save it for when it mattered most. “Come with me, Jyn.”

She considered him for a moment and then nodded. “I thought they’d get around to it sooner or later. Fine by me, I don’t like being just one more mouth to feed.”

“It’s not an obligation. I asked permission for you to come.”

The edges of her mouth seemed to soften. “I didn’t realize you’d grown so fond of me.” She said it so playfully, as if she meant nothing by it, that she must have meant a good deal.

Fondness wasn’t what he felt. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure. If nothing else, he wanted to buy time to understand himself better.

 

* * *

 

Wobani was gray-skied and wet; it smelled of mildew and mud. Cassian had packed dry socks, zipped between his shirt and his jacket, even though he’d packed nothing else: he couldn’t brush his teeth or wash his hands or put his head down on anything other than leaves, but he changed his socks every other day. They could only talk by putting their mouths directly against each other’s ears, but he told her, in a lower whisper: “I was in a place nearly identical to this once and spent a week a half in a bog. By the time I got home again, my feet looked like a dead man’s. Never again. I’d rather be shot than that—it could have gone to gangrene.”

Jyn, whose missions had been precision strikes, in-and-out and no waiting, considered her own boots nervously. Cassian smiled, a quick flash of teeth, an expression so brilliant it should have called down every sniper within reach. “Don’t worry. I brought you some too.”

“You’re a god among husbands, Captain Andor.”

So she got used to it—rolling onto her back in the muck and drawing her feet up to her chest, tugging her boots off and getting everything stripped and replaced as quickly as possible so she could resume lying flat on her belly, her eyes toward the mining camp—and she got used to him, even more than she’d been already. Maybe it was because they could barely talk. It had been a long time since Jyn had put much stock in words.

The warmth at her shoulder mattered more. So did the dry socks on her feet.

They saw two worker executions. Cassian put his head down against the ground at each one and breathed into the clumps of tangled grass; when he looked up again, his forehead was smudged with dirt and dew. Jyn didn’t look away, but she felt her body drawing up, slingshot elastic pulled to its breaking point.

“Easy,” Cassian said during the unceremonious carting off of the body, his hand on hers. “There’s nothing we can do. Don’t get yourself killed.”

“I hate watching things like this.”

“I know.” But he didn’t tell her not to look—he seemed to understand even without being told that she couldn’t have helped it. “But sometimes bearing witness is the only help we can give.”

“We should come back with a squadron and light them up from the sky, burn them until the planet steams,” Jyn said, with a savageness that tore at her throat. “Saw would do it.”

“Then you’d be the one killing the miners. That’s no better.”

“It would be over.”

“It’s not enough to pull down the Empire,” Cassian said. “We have to have a galaxy worth living in after it’s all over. Not pass on smoke and ashes.” Even in a whisper, he sounded like he had more assurance than she’d ever felt: a strength of conviction so solid she could almost bite down on it, the way as a child, in her earliest days with Saw, she’d slipped the kyber crystal on her necklace into her mouth and sucked on it, so vicious in her desire to have something of her parents that was real that she’d once chipped one of her milk teeth. She’d been grateful for the blood in her mouth.

She didn’t understand him. He had gone through what she had, seen the same dark corners of the universe. She knew by now that he had his share of nightmares. (She would lie along his back with her arm around him until he stopped talking in his sleep, until his muscles eased. She tried not to think about the times she woke up from uneasy dreams herself, always with his hand against her hip and his breath warm on the back of her neck.)

He misread her silence.

“Believe me, Jyn,” he said, “if anger were enough, I could burn all this down myself.”

“Yeah.” She swallowed. “I believe you.”

“Then what is it?”

“I—envy you. I don’t think I have that solid ground.”

But that seemed less true these days. She wiggled her toes again. Still dry. Still warm.

What separated him from Saw was that he knew warmth and not just fire.

By the ninth day, the squelch of the mud and the squawks of the gulls were fraying her temper. The constant, oily damp had brought out pimples on her forehead and a rash on her hands; her bladder ached from having to wait and wait until it was safe enough to raise up into a crouch; the taste in her mouth was stale and filthy. She spent hours in a silent fume, imagining what she would have done here if she had been on her own, if her hands weren’t tied by the Alliance and the way Cassian’s eyes grew distant when he was disappointed.

She had said what Saw would do, if confronted with Wobani, and Cassian had changed her mind, opened her eyes to how that wasn’t what she really wanted.

For the first time, it was an open question: what would she—just herself—do?

_But I’m not just myself_ , she thought, first sourly and then tentatively. _Cassian’s here._

Well, say at the moment that she wasn’t interested in solid ground, only with giving herself something to think about.

She edged closer to him so they could talk safely. “It’s the workers who have the most to lose if we make the wrong move, you said.”

“Not in so many words, but yes.”

“What if we could talk to one?”

“We can’t.”

“Your contact must have gotten word out somehow.”

“Not mine. The Alliance’s, the senator’s. I don’t know them.”

She bottled up her frustration: when she had said him, she had meant the Alliance. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that there was any distinguishing them, aside from the obvious of him being singular and particular. “I didn’t mean that you could talk to them, that you’d know them by sight. Just that they must have some contact with the outside, something unmonitored, or barely monitored. Something we’re not seeing.”

He turned his head toward her. “What message would you tell them?”

He was—interested. Waiting on her. But she was frozen. Who was she to tell them anything, to act like some hero dropped out of the stars? She wasn’t that, never had been that. _Riot_ , she wanted to say, _I would tell them to riot_ , but did she want that blood on their hands? He was the one who had made her see she didn’t, for fuck’s sake. But she couldn’t shake how she would feel, with those auto-lock chains on her, with this sky above her every hour of every day until her back gave out. She would welcome an excuse for violence and revolution was as good a one as any. Hadn’t her whole life taught her that?

_They wouldn’t have asked us here if all they needed was encouragement or anger. They could come up with that themselves. Anyone with enough presence of mind to reach out could reach others. Cassian would._

“You’ve ruined me,” she said, not really joking. “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything anymore.”

He rubbed his thumb across her cheekbone. “I couldn’t ruin you, Jyn. I wouldn’t have the strength. Tell me what you’d tell them.”

“It’ll be wrong.”

“Dammit, just tell me.”

She said the first thing she could think of, just to have the conversation done with. “Something they can’t know—some detail of the landscape, or the guards’ rotations, or—”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it, that’s what they’ll need. Information is a weapon.”

“Weapons are weapons,” Jyn said. “Information never gutted anyone.”

The energy drained out of him as swiftly as if she’d cut his throat, and so, she supposed, guessing the problem too late, a lack of information could gut, in the wrong hands, voiced stupidly. His family, she was sure of it now. “Cassian—”

“Never mind.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Mine too,” Jyn said, “and I know that it still—”

“I’ve lived since then,” Cassian said. “I don’t know that you have.” He didn’t say it to cut her—she could tell—but it did all the same. More weaponry. Maybe he was just determined to prove he was right, and if so, she would agree to that now readily enough.

Right in more ways than one, actually. “No,” she said. “I haven’t. But I don’t think it matters, living or not living. I think I could live as long and as well as you like and it would still hurt, and I’m just trying to say I’m sorry.”

Cassian exhaled. “All right.”

“Okay.” She took her own sniffly, uneven breath. “What’s most pertinent? If we could pass on a message, what would we need it to say?”

He looked at her and she noticed the length of his eyelashes for the first time: it wasn’t that they were especially long or especially short, only that she was suddenly sure she could draw them out and get their measurements perfectly. Particular and specific, she’d thought him. He was that. And she could see him, step by step, making the choice to forgive her, or almost to take mercy out of that locked box inside himself where he kept it safe and then to spend it on her, to use up that little bit without knowing if it would come back to him.

He said, “You’re alive.”

She didn’t feel it, except sometimes, around him. Not now, but intermittently. “How can you tell?”

He touched her cheek again. “You’re warm.”

She held still, like she would startle his hand from her face if she so much as breathed wrong. “Thank you.”

Cassian said, “I would tell them that they take the bodies of the executed off-world, as a sop to the Senate and any investigators who might be assigned to oversee worker conditions. I would say that it’s a light duty, just two stormtroopers, one at each end of the body, one body at a time. Their hands full. And blasters still on their hips, available, if someone could reach them. That’s what I would tell them.”

Jyn said, “That sounds good,” and he brought his mouth against hers, clumsy and sideways.

It was a mutually inflicted bruise more than a kiss. When they were done, she said, without looking at him, “You know my father is in a place like this. Maybe nicer, maybe safer, because he’s less expendable, but—a prison.”

It was the first time she’d admitted to him that she knew Galen Erso wasn’t dead. That was how they always said his name, how she heard it in a whisper a dozen times a day: _Galen Erso, Galen Erso_ , _that’s Galen Erso’s daughter_.

“He’s a prized science officer,” Cassian said. He sounded neutral. She knew he wanted to be, but she knew what was beneath it: neutrality was pretending not to have a side, and there was no other side here, only the truth, whatever the Alliance said.

“He’s a prisoner. If they ask for hostages to keep you, you’re a prisoner. It doesn’t make any difference whether the cell comes with a pillow or a view.”

She should know. She’d expected to become one herself, when word of Saw continuing on as Saw had reached her. But here she was, still, as free as anyone could be with her face half-down in the muck.

She waited for him to say something—to lie and say he believed her that it was the same, to tell the truth and say he knew damn well there was a difference—but instead he said, “Anyone you could love so much must be worth loving.”

After that—after all of it, after the Wobani uprising—the senator gave them each a medal. Cassian said, dismissively, that he had a whole drawer full of them, or would if he’d ever bothered to carry them from one base to another. Jyn just wanted to know who the hell wasted valuable resources on trinkets. She knew her reward for speaking up on Wobani, and no one had given it to her but him.

 

* * *

 

Within a month, they were relocated to the central Alliance base on Yavin IV. Their new berth, allocated now for two rather than one, was more spacious; it had its own kitchen, even if that kitchen was nothing more than a cold-keep with a busted seal and a spindly microwave cage. The walls where he would fail to paint his forest were larger; the ceilings were higher and would accommodate taller trees.  But they had had to leave almost everything behind and he kept waiting for Jyn to say that she’d told him so, that it wasn’t worth getting attached, wasn’t worth their time to try to care.

She didn’t. She said, “We might as well give ourselves a warm welcome, don’t you think?”

Sex between them lately had developed awkwardness alongside intimacy—for every night that ended with Jyn almost absently running her bare foot up and down his calf as she talked, or as she listened to him talk, there was some fumbling bit of poor communication, an eagerness to please that translated into bumped noses and sore jaws and strained muscles. Tentativeness had come into their bed uninvited. It had given him, at least, time to appreciate the smallest and most specific details of her: the turned-in ugliness of her toes, the small brown mole on her left nipple, the smudge that was nearly always on her forehead from where she pushed her hair back with metal polish or oil still on her hands, the way her hands curled into fists in the sheets when she was near the edge. Sometimes he thought that was the whole problem. They’d lost the gestalt of each other, gotten too distracted by the sudden _attention_ they seemed to be paying. He knew she was just as bad as he was: it was in the way she ran her fingers through his stubble when he was between shaves, the way she pushed his hair back to look at his ears and put them gently between her teeth.

But that night, it was different. They’d made it to the other side of whatever bridge they’d been on.

He liked the neatness of that, that they had made it to a new place in a new place. It was the kind of detail he would have given to a cover identity.

He only thought of that afterwards, though: it wasn’t the kind of encounter made for in-the-moment philosophizing.

They went slowly at first—he licked a line down her belly before he reached her cunt, liking best the slight softness just below her navel, liking the way he could feel her muscles tense with anticipation as she started being able to feel his breath and the tickle of his beard against her inner thighs. When he was inside her, she put her legs around him and her hand against his cheek and then his shoulder, and then she seemed to be touching him everywhere, brushing one thumb over his nipple, pressing her heels into his ass until he was driven deeper into her and her eyes went wider.

It all felt intense and syrupy slow, and he didn’t know whether to be grateful or regretful when desperation finally sped them up, finally brought him to lift her wrists above her head and hold them there—“You’re such a distraction,” he said, and she laughed, a beautiful sound, as lovely as the beat of her pulse against his fingertips—and brought her to break into a flurry of profanity in at least three different languages as she came and tightened around him.

They were on stand-down for two weeks. Since Wobani, the council had come, without explanation or formality, to treat the two of them as a unit and to treat Jyn as an assimilated agent.

“Well, you have the medal,” Cassian had said.

“Not anymore. I sold it at that little shop on Rannar. What do you think paid for the only decent booze in the whole Rebellion?”

“The next time we go somewhere you can get a decent price, trade mine too.”

“But you look handsome in yours.” A little dark red flush on her face. “I keep wanting to take you to bed in that and nothing else.”

Beyond that, she’d said nothing about her sudden conscription. If she suspected at all that it was partly due to Cassian’s scrupulous report to the council about her work on Wobani, she said nothing, to either his credit or his blame. Her key virtue, he had said in his report, was loyalty, personal loyalty. Bail Organa had said that was something they could work with. No one mentioned Saw, not even Jyn, not even when Cassian glimpsed his name in the data-bursts she read with her lips pressed tightly together.

Neither of them, in any case, was inclined to dispute two weeks of peace and quiet, especially after their first night on Yavin IV. For a long time, they saw no reason to leave the bed. Cassian did take the medal out and wear it for her, and she fucked him while tracing its engraving with one fingertip. When she came, she flattened her palm on it, pushing it against his chest, giving him a ready excuse for the sudden shortness of his breath.

“It’s nice to have a kitchen,” he said one day, and by that afternoon, he had sat her down on the wobbly half-sized cold-keep, her bare thighs against the chilled edge.

“Oh, Cassian, fuck, I’m going to freeze.”

He grinned against her neck. “You said you were hot.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“And you,” he said, thrusting into her harder, “shouldn’t keep saying things you’ll have to take back once you start begging.”

“I don’t _beg_.”

“Harder, faster, touch me.”

“Orders.”

“Not in that voice.”

“And what,” she said, positioning herself so she was a little more off the cold-keep, holding herself on it now mostly with her hands and the tightened muscles of her ass, a gymnast’s pose as she tried to lift her most sensitive skin off the frosty metal, “if I don’t do it? What’s your interrogation strategy then, to make me talk?”

He pushed her back against all that cold and she gasped.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Harder,” Jyn said, laughing now while still gasping, while still wincing, with a kind of stardust glitter in her eyes. “Faster, touch me. Make me warm.” She wriggled forward again, locking her legs around his waist now and her hands around his shoulders, levering himself up. “ _Please_.”

Something had changed between them and he tried, as well as he could, to explain it to K-2—not because he hoped K would change his mind and approve of her, when K seldom approved of anyone, but because K was the only real friend Cassian had. If witnesses had been necessary for the wedding, to make it valid on whatever primitive, illegal level that it was, then maybe they were necessary for this stumbling progression, too. And he wanted to talk. The situation with Jyn felt dense, a mess of brambles and thorns still remarkable for its flowers, and no one was better at cutting through what was unnecessary than K. Imperial straightforwardness, maybe: always the shortest line between two points.

“You can omit the details,” K said. “The tales of the noises coming from your assigned housing have nearly passed into legend. I _don’t_ see the appeal.”

“In her?”

“In the mess.”

“I enjoy the mess.”

“So I’ve heard, along with everyone else within earshot. What I _haven’t_ heard is why you or I or anyone else should trust her.”

“The uprising on Wobani was her planning.”

“I’ve read the report,” K said, and if he weren’t mechanical, he would have been sniffing, Cassian could tell. “As I recall, she said, ‘We should tell them something,’ and you then provided a lengthy script, orchestrated its delivery, and inspired a workers’ revolt. I wouldn’t exactly call her contribution substantial.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it without her.”

K looked at him, the lights of his eyes unchanging. “I was worried about you, you know.”

“You said.”

“She comes from an unreliable background.”

When Cassian still believed the Force had any benevolence, it was when he was around K—he had seen the stock-still Imperial droids, their syllables rigid and their answers devoid of imagination. No reprogramming, or at least none the kind his own clumsy rewiring and patched-together lines of code could have supplied, should have rightly endowed him with _himself_. He was a working of the universe, and of the universe only.

He was thinking of that as much as of the featureless Imperial factory from which he’d stolen a deactivated, limp-bodied droid marked K-2SO, right from between K-1SO and K-3SO, one row over from K-2TO, one bit of sculpted metal indistinguishable from another except for the labeling. He was thinking of good fortune and bad.

The unreliable backgrounds of the only two people he could ever share anything with.

“So do you.”

“I can’t help that.”

“Neither can she.”

“It’s disappointing to me that marriage has made you so logical,” K said. “There won’t be any fun anymore in being right.”

So Cassian wasn’t surprised, three days later, when he came back from a hard afternoon’s sparring session to find the two of them sitting around a stolen—“ _Commandeered_ ,” K said—sabacc board. Jyn had filled up a tin mug with swill that smelled too much like lamp oil for even Cassian to touch, some half-price mutt-liquor of fermented fruit medley, citrus in with stone fruit in with a handful of vinegary, peppery weeds.

“You won’t be on your feet tomorrow if you keep putting that away.”

“Only appropriate,” she said, “considering how I’m getting knocked on my ass right now.”

“She cheats,” K informed Cassian.

“Only to stop myself from getting even more bloodily murdered than I already am.”

“I can’t help it that in a game of logic, I have the upper hand. And I wouldn’t even if I could.”

“Conversation with you is a joy.”

“Your husband thinks so.”

“Joy may be an overstatement,” Cassian said, leaning against the back of Jyn’s chair. Her hair was falling down from its bun and he twined a piece of it around his finger. “So who did you _commandeer_ the board from?”

“Beale Moa-la,” Jyn said absently. “I promised I’d get her a shell flute the next time we rendezvous with our source on Hessia.”

He couldn’t shake his surprise that she had talked to anyone—that somehow, without him even noticing, she hadn’t only learned names and the currencies for bribes—any spy could have done that—but made herself into someone trustworthy in their eyes, when a year ago, she’d been the daughter of an extremist and two collaborators. She was the architect of the Wobani Rebellion now. His partner.

She turned to look at him. “What?”

His wife.

“I was just thinking.”

“He was being surprised that you had friends,” K said in his most condescendingly helpful voice. “And you’re in check again, rude gesture notwithstanding.”

“It was just hard,” Jyn said softly. She was leaning back against her chair, her head bent back over the edge to look at him with upside-down eyes. “Saying I’d get to know people again. I spent a long time running in place—it’d started to feel like I was always losing ground to a landslide. But you’re different. This place is different.”

K said, “She’s very drunk. Before her third cup, she actually stood a fighting chance.”

“Of winning?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of losing in a less humiliating manner.”

He kept looking at Jyn’s hair wrapped around his finger; kept looking at K, who on occasion was feigning not to notice Jyn’s sloppy, drunken maneuvering of his knights as well as her own. When he’d agreed to marry her, he’d wanted peace, and this was what he had instead. All of them sullied with dirt and blood and history, with programming that made them sharpish and caustic and sometimes cruel. But he hadn’t loved the old base any less for the bloodstain on the wall that could never get scrubbed out. Maybe there was no getting rid of the things they had done and been, not here and now, but there was this. Nothing clean--but the glimmer on the soap bubble, the beauty trapped there for just an instant. Impossible to sustain, maybe. But as real as anything else he had ever known.

_Welcome home_.


End file.
